Corps studied flood warning system for dams, but dropped idea

A man throws a net into Buffalo Bayou with the Barker Dam and Barker Reservoir in the background.. ( Gary Coronado / Houston Chronicle )

A man throws a net into Buffalo Bayou with the Barker Dam and Barker Reservoir in the background.. ( Gary Coronado / Houston Chronicle )

Photo: Gary Coronado, Staff

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An airboat travels north along S. Kirkwood Rd. west of Beltway 8 and south of Interstate 10 where homes are inundated with water from the overflowing Buffalo Bayou to the north, Saturday, September 2, 2017, in Houston. Houston mayor Sylvester Turner issued a new mandatory evacuation order Saturday for homes with water in them south of Interstate 10, north of Briar Forest, east of Highway 6 and west of Gessner Rd. As water continues to be released from the Addicks and Barker reservoirs. (Mark Mulligan / Houston Chronicle)

An airboat travels north along S. Kirkwood Rd. west of Beltway 8 and south of Interstate 10 where homes are inundated with water from the overflowing Buffalo Bayou to the north, Saturday, September 2, 2017, in

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1995 examined a series of proposals to reduce flood risks around the Addicks and Barker dams, including a flood warning system and evacuation plan to protect lives and homes, but dropped the ideas after deciding there were "insufficient economic benefits" to further investigate.

It is unclear whether the Corps ever took up the warning system idea again, and two decades later, city and county officials do not recall that such a plan was ever developed by the federal agency that constructed and operates the dams.

After at least two people died in Hurricane Harvey floodwaters following an Aug. 28 midnight release from the swelling reservoirs, downstream residents are wondering why a better plan was not put into place to warn them.

"I could have done a lot had I had some warning," said Hank Bussa, Jr., 71, who lives downstream of Addicks reservoir. "I could have saved some very expensive furniture and valuables and all my important papers and my computers and my personal files and my cars."

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Bussa said he chose to live below the dams because he thought he would be most protected there from Houston's perennial floods. He said he would have welcomed a better warning system.

"If they thought it was important to propose that, somebody looked at what kind of water it would take to make that happen and deemed it possible," Bussa said.

Corps officials did not respond to requests for comment Friday.

The revelation of the 1995 report comes as public officials begin a concerted campaign to better prepare for events like Harvey. The storm dropped up to 52 inches of rain across Harris County, killed nearly 80 people across the state, and flooded an estimated 136,000 homes and structures in the county.

Pressure is building at the federal, state and local level to better prepare for the next flood.

An Oct. 5 letter from Gov. Greg Abbott, Texas Senators and Congressmen to congressional appropriations committees calls for nearly $19 billion in funding, including $10 billion for the Corps.

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett last month called for a sweeping reexamination of the region's flood control strategy. He, and other members of the Commissioners Court, have said they would back a bond referendum that could fund upwards of $1 billion in flood control projects.

The 1995 report was part of a larger study in the aftermath of a 1992 flood that "severely tested the capacity of the reservoirs," looking at whether the Corps should make any changes as the threats around the reservoirs increased. Development upstream was increasing runoff into the reservoirs, threatening to swamp more homes in the designated flood pools - emergency lake beds behind the Barker and Addicks dams that fill with water as the reservoirs fill. Downstream, prolonged releases were eroding Buffalo Bayou's banks.

In anticipation of the increased flooding, the report examined several alternatives, including buyouts upstream of the dams, excavation of the reservoir pools, increasing discharge from the reservoirs, buying out homes downstream, and the implementation of a flood warning system.

"In the absence of a public awareness program, residents are likely to forget or ignore the flood threat," the report states. "Turnover in home ownership could also result in a significant proportion of residents being unaware of the risk. A low intensity information program backed by a strong, direct early warning system and an implementable evacuation plan could substantially reduce health and safety risks and moderately reduce flood damages."

Ultimately, the report's authors concluded that further investigation into the idea "be terminated because of insufficient economic benefits to justify project modification."

Jim Blackburn, an environmental lawyer who co-directs Rice University's Severe Storm Prediction, Education, and Evacuation from Disasters center, said he had never heard of the Corps plan or the warning system idea.

"It's exactly what should have been done," Blackburn said. "If we had had that in existence, it would have made quite a lot of difference."

Two experts said warning systems are common across the country when it comes to other natural disasters, such as tornados or earthquakes, and implementing a targeted system could be a relatively low-cost initiative compared to other infrastructure improvements needed.

"It's good practice to have such plans, processes in place and working," said Robert Bea, a University of California-Berkeley engineering professor emeritus who formed the campus's Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, and who lived in Houston along Buffalo Bayou near the reservoirs from 1969 to 1980. "We've lost our concern, our worriedness for something that we need to be worried about fairly constantly."

Dennis Mileti, University of Colorado at Boulder professor emeritus who wrote a 2015 report for the Corps on how to improve public alerts and warnings for dam emergencies, said the public and political will to fund flood warning systems and evacuation planning drops in the years after a disaster, hampering the implementation of such projects.

"You come back in two years, no one will have much concern about it at all, because people go back to living life wondering and worrying about putting food on the table," Mileti said.

"You wouldn't even notice the cost of a flood warning system," he added.

Mileti said local officials - not the Corps - should be responsible for flood warnings and evacuation planning.

While Harris County Judge Ed Emmett agreed with the sentiment for developing a better warning system, he said the county does have rain and stream gauges that measure flows and floods. If an evacuation is necessary, both he and Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner can issue evacuation orders.

Harris County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management spokesman Francisco Sanchez said the Corps had expressed interest this summer, before Harvey, in developing a better flood warning system.

"There's a lot of people moving toward what can we do better for flood warning," Sanchez said.

In the mid 1990's, such system likely would have been a "reverse 911" system that used peoples' telephone landlines to alert them of danger, he said. These days, with the explosion in wireless communications, the county is working to use social media and mobile phones to warn residents of flood dangers.

Sanchez said the county has developed a system to automatically send out messages through the social-media platform Twitter when bayous are out of their banks.

Turner did issue a voluntary evacuation order Sept. 1 for flooded homes west of Gessner, east of Highway 6, south of I-10 and north of Briarforest, and a mandatory evacuation order for the same area the day after.

Questions to Turner's office about the Corps's 1995 proposal and why it was not pursued further were not answered Friday afternoon.

Michael Walter, spokesman for the Houston's Office of Emergency Management, said the city does communicate with the Corps and the Harris County Flood Control District during flood events, and will pursue evacuations if necessary.

Walter said the city does have the ability to target certain geographic areas and send text messages in emergencies. However, he said he could not explain why that was not done downstream of the reservoirs when the releases began.

Walter said next month, the city plans to buy a new warning system that could send longer warnings in different languages. Currently, alert messages only can be sent in English.

Matt Zeve, Harris County Flood Control District's director of operations, said the district is working on maps showing flooding across the county in "real time," with the eventual goal of being able to project which areas will flood ahead of time based on weather forecasts.

Flood control officials could not explain why the 1995 report was never examined further.

Zeve said such an endeavor likely would require Congressional approval.

"All these seemingly simple things have to go through Congress," he said.